


Closing Time, Then and Now

by fragrantwoods



Category: Closing Time (Leonard Cohen song)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-09
Updated: 2012-12-09
Packaged: 2017-11-20 16:26:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/587396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fragrantwoods/pseuds/fragrantwoods
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Interpretation of one possible background story for Leonard Cohen's "Closing Time"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Closing Time, Then and Now

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MadameHardy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MadameHardy/gifts).



Maybe it was the times. Maybe everything had just been too damn hot to survive whole. That happened a lot back then.

Our youth had been the cooling water, the foam from the fire extinguisher, that kept it all from incinerating us and all we touched. We just hadn’t learned that yet. We thought it had something to do with us, with our agency.

We were so very full of shit then.

It was glorious. 

It was 1977. She was barely twenty-one, but she had the moves of one of those ageless women, the ones who you just knew had been courtesans in a former life. 

I’d spotted her at the bar while I was waiting for my dealer to finish getting blown (I didn’t know if he was in the men’s or the ladies’, and I suppose it didn’t matter, either then or now). 

Everybody had the same gestures back then…the web of the hand between thumb and forefinger brought quickly to the nose, head back and a slight pinch, and then the relaxed smile while waiting for the high to hit. 

I never danced so well as I danced within the first half-hour of a good coke buzz. It was wild, it was Studio 54 a million miles from New York. Articles of clothing would scatter the floor by night’s end. I always wondered if the poor saps and sap-ettes showed up the next day in a K-Mart tee-shirt, asking the cleaners if their blouse or their shirt had turned up.

Anyway, there was this girl….

She was gorgeous. She’d been hitting the Johnny Walker fairly steadily (a girl like that never had to dip into her purse to buy her own drinks) and her blouse dipped and her skirt hiked a little more with every swallow. Her breasts…the skin there was pale and glowing, like twin moons coming out of a cloud. 

And she liked me.

I was the shit then. A month past my thirtieth birthday and I thought I knew it all…thought I had it all. Hair fashionably barbered by somebody who was famous then, although his name escapes me now. 

Enough jewelry to look chic, not so much that I looked gay…just fashionable, with a hint I might swing both ways. The girls loved that. I believe I might have been wearing Gray Flannel cologne that season. Good shoes, something Italian, if memory serves. 

We talked. 

We started off about the band, then went on to critique the dancers. She was too sweet to be in a meat market like this, or so I thought. We were yelling into each other’s ear about something…maybe politics, or finance, when she started rubbing her naked thigh against me. I thought it was by accident at first, but no, not at all. 

Like I said, she had the moves of an ageless, beatific whore. That one patch of soft white thigh seemed to act on its own, stroking my hip, my cock, my hand. I swear, it was like I had nothing to do with it, other than to receive what she offered. 

I wasn’t going to take it much further, or that was the lie I told myself. And I kept telling myself that same lie as I sent a waitress to find my dealer and tell him I’d catch him later. 

As I invited her up to my room (not the VIP penthouse suite, but high enough above the city to have an impressive view).

I slipped my hand further up her skirt and whispered God knows what, but whatever I said, she liked it well enough to leave with me.

The corridor lights, coming out of that place, always struck me as garish, painting us denizens of the dark dance floor as the ridiculous creatures we were. We would have been more vibrant, I always thought, if we could have stumbled out into a night-shrouded parking lot, ideally rain-slicked for a little extra aesthetics. 

Her name was Vicki, which I found charming at the time but later thought sounded common and gauche. She staggered against me as “ _last call—last call for alcohol_ ” sounded from the bar. We listed down the corridor towards the elevator. Truth be told, I suppose I was loose-legged as well. I think we held a shared fiction that we wanted to get to know each other in a quieter environment, have a nice chat, as it were, see if we had anything in common. 

As I said, we were so full of shit then.

The door to my hotel room seemed to yawn before us, a trick of perspective brought on by alcohol and helped by the quarter-tab of Quaalude I’d dropped earlier. It is entirely possible that I’d had a teeny, tiny hit of acid earlier as well…it had been a long and busy night. It almost gave me pause.

I can’t answer for her.

But then we were in and the door slammed shut. I don’t know how she remembers it, but we were both horny as hell, worked up from the writhing dancers who’d practically been screwing on the dance floor, and by our own fumbling under the bar. I think I tried to open some conversation, but she heaved a sigh that lifted those radiant breasts almost out of her blouse, and I was lost. 

Now, I lived for a good piece of ass back then, but I have to say, Vicki could kiss like other women could screw—like she was starving for just that one thing. Hungry, devouring kisses that contained the very gestalt of her womanhood. Her tongue was in my mouth before I had time to be the aggressor, and she used her teeth, she ran her fingers over our lips where they joined…it was incredible. 

I think I fell in love with her then. At least a little bit.

She was so beautiful, and she knew it. Not in a vain way, but like her beauty gave her as much pleasure as it did me. Even then, I caught her watching us in the mirror, her auburn hair just billowing in these great fat waves, like fucking sails in a brisk wind. Her eyes were this amazing shade of hazel that threw off gold sparks (or so it seemed that night…I suppose it could have been the acid). Tiny waist, full breasts and lush curving hips, stiletto dancing heels that brought her almost to my height.

I don’t mean to sound like all I saw was tits and ass…what I mean to say is that she _inhabited_ those tits, that ass, to the point where she was impossible to objectify. It was all just _her_. At the time, it felt like she had found a way to fully integrate all the parts of her being into one magnificent whole woman. She had fucking _distilled_ herself into the very essence of “female” and I wanted that…I wanted her. 

The sex, when it came, was great, I suppose.

I’m sure it was.

But everything was beginning to wear off by the second round. We talked, though. I think we both saw something special in each other. We must have…we tried to carry that into the light of day. 

We tried for five years, give or take those last few months, when neither of us knew, really, where we were or what we wanted. Fidelity was harder in the early eighties, I think. The money, the drugs…even the wake-up call of AIDS didn’t rein us in. Not then. 

Anyway, we split up, she moved to San Francisco or San Fernando or somewhere like that. I really didn’t think I’d ever see her again (and by then, really, we couldn’t stand the sight of each other, for no good reason other than we hadn’t sustained that early rush and the knowing of that wrecked us). 

Life went on. 

I remarried, had kids, et cetera…lived the fucking dream, after Vicki left. Even got a fucking gold watch when I retired, if you can believe that. It was the last year my company could afford such wasteful luxuries.

My grandkids had pestered and harangued me into getting a Facebook account—they can be demanding little wretches sometimes—and a message popped up one day.

Vicki. 

Her profile picture…you could see what she’d been, once. She was still a handsome woman, even at her age. And I couldn’t throw any stones. I remained nine years older than her, any way you sliced it. 

I can still pull the occasional thirty-something, though, given dim lights and a few drinks. Second rounds are long past me, as you might expect, and there are times when even the first round is off the table. Thank God for cunnilingus.

We chatted. We called. We messaged and texted. 

Would you believe it, that joint was still in business? I guess hotels will always need a place for strangers to get drunk and play with the false intimacy of dancing. I have no idea what she told her husband as to why she needed to come back to her old stomping grounds. Maybe she called me an old friend from school. 

The music’s all digital these days, of course. And the bar was pretty dead that night. You could see the bones of what it had been, if you squinted and used your imagination. 

I suppose the same could be said of us. 

Vicki…I don’t know what augmentations or procedures she’d had done over the years, but in the low lights, the skin-tight dress (over Spanx, I imagine, like all women seem to do these days), the colored hair…she looked and felt fabulous, at least to me. We talked, shared stupid jokes, told each other what we’d really been thinking back then. I hadn’t laughed as much in a year as I did that night. 

There were some kids in the bar (I say “kids” but they’re probably the same demographic as the place had always attracted…twenty-one to thirty or so) and they kept cutting their eyes towards us and snickering. It should have hurt our feelings, but it made us laugh that much more. They think their youth, or maybe their _specialness,_ is some sort of shield against the inevitable change that comes to us all. 

One had a Rolex…they’ve come back in style, I guess. The women were glorious by the standards of the times. Their breasts still thrust suggestively out the tops of their blouses, their knees and thighs rub against those Armani suits. And they all shared a good laugh at the old couple who were discreetly feeling each other up under the shadows of the bar. 

They think they will never be us. I whispered this to Vicki and she snorted and choked on her amaretto sour as she laughed, but there was a sheen of tears in her eyes. 

We will never be them, either. 

I raised my glass (still Johnny Walker) to the table in a salute full of irony that they wouldn’t get, not for another twenty years or so. 

We will never be them, but oh, children…you will be us. 

I’m not a religious man, but I wonder, sometimes, what God thinks of all this. We scrabble so hard for some happiness, some pleasure in life, but the devil seems to be in those details that we are drawn to the most. The lust, the vanity…all those infamous sins that we adore and that feel so fucking good. 

I heard a sermon once (purely by accident…I’d left the television on one Saturday night) that suggested we’d have an almost perfect world if we took the energy we spend in worldly pursuits and pleasures of the flesh, and put them towards Christ, or God, or whatever deity is in charge of goodness. 

I thought about that as I watched the frenetic writhing on the dance floor. There’s plenty of energy, all right. There always has been, in places like this. But the only time I felt anything like God’s presence was when Vicki opened her blouse the first time, while the blinding disco ball threw shattery white flashes of light across the room. 

I suspect God would turn up His nose at having anything to do with that. 

I never did find anyone else like Vicki, and I told her so. She didn’t say much about what or who she’d found. There was still something a little like love between us. We relived the night we met, snickers from the peanut gallery and all. 

They still yell “ _last call—last call for alcohol!”_ even now. Unto the seventh generation, I suppose. We don’t stagger as blithely as we used to (maybe one or both of us is secretly afraid of falling and breaking a hip), but we make it to closing time again. 

The lights in the hotel corridor are just as blinding as they ever were.   
**  
**


End file.
